So let’s say you get the rights to make a “Star Wars” product, and now you need to guide your creative staff to nail the look, feel, tone, and overall style of the original three movies. What do you need? I’m not talking about worldbuilding stuff like Jedi, X-Wings, and Wookies, but more low-level art cues. Let’s assume you want to make “new” Star Wars stuff. You want new races, new planets, and new time periods, but you want the new stuff to still feel like Star Wars.

“Luke NounVerber” style names.

Maybe a ship named in the style of “Adjective Birdname”.

Ships should be really lumpy. The original ships were made by dumping out dozens of disparate models and gluing them together to make spaceship-shaped stuff.

Slender droids with quirky or eccentric personalities.

Other droids that make beeping noises all the time, even though nobody understands them.

Use an orchestral score. Or just recycle the original John Williams music.

Robes and capes for almost everybody, regardless of climate.

Building exteriors should feel kind of like the spaceships: Lumpy and irregular.

Most places should look well-worn. Places should have junk laying around. Dirt on the floor. Surfaces should be scuffed and the paint should be fading. A few edges of implied water damage wouldn’t hurt. Only fascists mop the floor.

Avoid mundane objects. No paper, coffee mugs, writing tools, etc.

Computers are banks of blinky lights, like 1960’s Star Trek.

It helps to have cables and hoses strewn around, hanging from the ceiling, and running down the walls.

Rooms with four walls are bad, so break up the square room shape any way you can. Passages are tube-shaped. Slant the walls. Make lots of round rooms. Add some support columns.

200 thoughts on “Knights of the Old Republic EP21: You’re Totally Ship-faced”

The ships need to be breaking or under repair all the time. Pristine ships are ships nobody has ever used before. (And pristine ships have no personality. Part of what made the original series so good was the Millennium Falcon had a personality all its own.)

The bad guys need to be clearly recognizable by face-concealing uniforms. Good guys should be recognizable by having visible faces.

Northcote Parkinson could tell you that there’s a perfectly good reason for monumental buildings containing vast chasms. It’s because such buildings are very expensive and therefore must be approved by a committee. Such a committee perhaps will contain a member who understands the purpose and proper scale of such a structure but will undoubtedly contain several who are impressed by sheer mass and boldness of vision. It therefore behooves an architect to appeal in his design to the latter rather than the former.

This is also why handrails are usually excluded; they would merely clutter the design. While it is true that they would likely save the lives of any number of workers who must cross the fathomless gaps in their workspaces, it is also true that individuals of that caliber will not be attending committee meetings and thereforce will not have the opportunity to advance their concerns. Furthermore, those worthies who do attend committee meetings will not be coming any closer to the abysses than peering at models and can thus focus on their important and dramatic aesthetic qualities rather than trouble themselves with the mundane and often quarrelsome details of safety.

One of the Force Unleashed games did that one better (I think it was II). I was watching a demo and at one point the player used a Force power to make a stormtrooper leap to his death through a floor-to-ceiling plate-glass window that was helping enclose a catwalk.

Apparently, the glass was a nod to safety in that it would take an entire single person to smash it to pieces from just a standing jump, and how often would that happen?

The old Star Wars tabletop RPG from West End Games even gave suggestions for this: “It’s not a wrench, it’s a hydrospanner. The players don’t find a sewing machine in the corner, they find a textile droid.”

I’d have to look for the source but I remember reading that Lucas did this on purpose to increase the alieness of the setting. The examples I specifically remember quoted were the lack of paper and the blue milk (though personally I found the milk case slightly cheesy).

Sadly this led to a decade long period where every piece of licensed Star Wars fiction had to include one scene where one character asked another character to hand him a hydrospanner, and at least one reference to a vibro blade.

I call this the “appeared-in-the-movies” effect (though it doesn’t really apply to vibro-blades), and it works like this: if it specifically appeared or was mentioned in the movies, it shows up more often.

So every time specific alcohol has come up in the EU, the different authors came up with their own names for specific beverages (Vistulo Brandale in the Thrawn trilogy, Ruby Bliels in Jedi Outcast, etc.), because no alcoholic beverages were ever named in the movies. On the other hand, 90% of all drug-junkies since Episode II use death-sticks, and the rest use “spice”, because both were (vaguely, in the latter case) mentioned in the movies. 95% of the locations in the galaxy which appear in the EU are planets which were mentioned or visited in the movies. And the line “Where are you taking this … thing?” is presumably meant to imply that Wookiees aren’t generally recognizable, but even before Revenge of the Sith, they were ridiculously common in the EU and were well-known among the Imperials to be one of the best races to enslave for physical labor …

While I hesitate to call on the prequel movies for lore backup, there’s precedent established there that the Sith have the ability to conceal themselves from the Jedi, even right under their noses. The power behind the ruins here could be hidden from thhe Jedi in a similar fashion.

Since I’m just playing KotOR now, I’m willing to give them this one. The Jedi are not necessarily archeologists, and given how huge a galaxy is, some old burial mounds on an out-of-the-way world could quite easily go unnoticed, assuming anyone wanted to bother with them anyway. Jedi or no, unless you’re looking for something, you won’t find it unless you somehow stumble on it. Revan, who possibly trained on Dantooine, apparently didn’t know there was anything interesting present until after he came back from the Outer Rim and had contact with some Very Interesting People. People find caches of old coins from time to time – sometimes quite valuable stuff – literally just sitting around under a few spadefuls of dirt in real life. It’s just that nobody turned over that specific spadeful in the last eon.

Of course, I tend to assume that things like “scope” are compressed in games. The Dantooine Enclave is about four rooms and a couple hallways, without exactly six beds in the entire place. The tomb itself doesn’t remotely make sense since there’s no place for the big wings of the tomb (which you can see but not enter) since there’s no actual stairs up or down, etc.

Jedi probably have a higher chance of being archaeologists than most folks. Studying history and digging up old Force artifacts is quite a Jedi occupation and in-fact the Sith base you visit later in the game is home to a full scale Sith archaeology team.

Although maybe it’s only the Sith who care about uncovering and learning from the past. Jedi are too busy force-punching people in the name of Good!

“Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good revolver at your side, Short Round. I’ve flown from one side of this planet to the other. I’ve seen a lot of strange stuff, but I’ve never seen anything to make me believe there’s one all-powerful force controlling everything. There’s no mystical energy field that controls my destiny. It’s all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense.”

My bet would be on scope as well. I mean, in the game it’s all within walking distance but I assume the tomb is meant to be in a remote location, just like I doubt it’s meant to be the case where the Council can see Juhani’s hounds chasing civilians down their front lawn, she’s “out there somewhere in the wilderness”.

That said the scope thing also kinda applies to puzzles. I mean, the games usually present your average Towers of Hanoi puzzle as this incredibly complex obstacle that can keep entire civilizations out of a location for centuries…

Are there any RPGs that don’t have a (building / cave / tomb) full of (priceless treasures / magical artefacts / lost technology) within easy walking distance of a major population center that no-one has ever bothered to visit?

Pillars of Eternity does have them, but it does seem to come up with reasonable in-universe reasons why they’re still full of treasures and not bandits: a culture whose foremost religious tenets include guarding the ancient ruins to ensure no one enters them, including themselves.

Star Wars has… interesting problems with time. Not uncommon problems, Lord of the Rings has the same problem. Which makes sense, because Star Wars borrows its themes way more heavily from LotR than it does from Flash Gordon serials. The thing is it’s an even older and weirder phenomenon than that implies.
A lot of myth-makers (literally into antiquity) try to present the past as a better-than-now steady state. Arthurian legend fictionalizes and idealizes the feudal system (to varying degrees, obviously, e.g. French version isn’t super keen on the chivalry of the Round Table). Roman myth fictionalizes and idealizes Romulus and Remus and Troy. This is a tiny bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison, for reasons we can get into later, but for now let’s get back to time.

In many of those myths and histories, the amount of time for which a “good” status quo persists gets exaggerated the further into the past it is. Part of this is straight up mythmaking. Methuselah’s 969 year lifespan (though it depends on who you ask) only barely exceeds his grandfather, Jared’s 962 year lifespan. You see a similar improbable extending of the reigns of “good” kings in other histories. Another part is when histories are long and complicated we impose a steady state on them, glossing over details we don’t find important. Most people probably think of Ancient Egypt as a kind of quasi-timeless civilization lasting for thousands of years. I mean, I don’t care about the differences between the old, middle, and new kingdoms. So as far as I’m concerned “ancient egypt” just has an unbroken 3000 year history where no one wore shirts and everyone had a Kopesh.

Both Middle Earth and Star Wars were created against this backdrop. So to make their versions bigger and more iconic those spans of time get bigger and more iconic. Granted: They both fight against this by creating space in our minds to believe that all sorts of neat and fantastical things are happening just outside the scope of the stories we’re presented with, but we still end up with dynasties and governments that are “unchanged” for thousands of years in both.

Also in both: things never seem to improve as a result of research or developing new technology?

Star Wars sort of implies that they’ve settled on the types of technology but keep making them better. There’s a number of incidents (Xim’s war droids, the Katana fleet) where someone recovers old tech and it’s basically the same as modern tech except not as good. Also, the X-wing is on like its thirtieth retrofit by the Legacy Of The Force series. Various minor upgrades, stealth tech, modifications to deal with the exotic Yuuzhan Vong defenses. That was a pretty neat concept; they used a bibiological gravity generator that created a micro-singularity to eat incoming fire but got tired if continually refocused, so the New Republic retrofitted their weapons to have a mode where they generated a spray of low-power shots that looked like full-power shots to make them waste energy.

I’m mostly discussing the “canon” as of the Disney buyout. Mostly because that’s what of the media I consumed. I’d believe there are X-U Star Wars writers that are probably better fans of more future-focused stories like Star Trek and Flash Gordon (or hell, even Ghost Busters).

I’m being coarse as fuck here, but I always try and categorize what side of the future- or past-focused dichotomy fiction lies on. Star Wars is interested in an idealized past which we should aspire to. Star Trek is interested in an idealized future which we should aspire to.

I think that we live in a really weird time period. Technology has progressed at an amazing rate for the past 200 years, and looks like it will continue to progress for a while at least (not gonna try to predict how long).

Most of history wasn’t like that. Progress was slow, and people lived with more or less the same technology that their great-great-grandparents had.

It seems to me that there must be an end to technological progress for us at some time. Moore’s law can’t last forever. We have already progressed far enough in fundamental laws of particle physics that further experiments are very difficult and expensive. In the distant future most people will look back on history and see a more or less constant level of tech throughout. Our belief in progress will look weird to them.

“I think that we live in a really weird time period. Technology has progressed at an amazing rate for the past 200 years, and looks like it will continue to progress for a while at least (not gonna try to predict how long).”

Yeah, that’s totally true. But “most of history” was like that, maybe since before the first Agricultural Revolution. You can find words to the effect of what you’ve written throughout recorded history, it’s just a matter of how difficult it is to find them among all those financial tablets. I feel like you could fit exponential growth on a scatter plot of “quantity of science” and it would be good. If there are differences it’s in how rapidly these advances have become somewhat ubiquitous. Water-based wate removal, for example, is no longer reserved for the very rich or public spaces. Even people we count as poor have access to private toilets.

We have evidence that people have been constantly pining for “the good old days” and lamenting rapid changes to society that their forebears did not have to weather. This feeling that “the past” changed less dramatically than “the present” has more to do with how bad we are at history than the rate at which our societies and technologies change. Regardless of how steep that exponential growth currently is.

Only an evil empire would overhaul their starfighters after every battle and make sure that they are all up to the factory spec.

Heroic rebels don’t even expect their mechanics to put the hood back on their vehicle after messing with the engine, even if the hood is an armor plate on an armored vehicle, and a less courageous and heroic individual might be under the impression that he needs that, for some silly reason.

Almost everyone is a Caucasian human. Almost every exception to this rule is someone who whose entire personality can be summed up by “is an X,” and in most cases is the only example of “being an X” in the galaxy.

(This is in reference primarily to the movies – I recognize in the expanded universe there are whole planets of wookies, etc.)

By the time of Luke Skywalkers Mandalorians have declined so much their armour is used by one Jar Jar like human by the name of Booby Feet.
For ship name I propose Fat Kiwi.
Back to jedi morality, notice how Carth has been stopping you from doing acts of evil, however Bastila allows you to make them then she preaches about it. “Doing things like that is the path to the dark side.” So is not speaking up before she runs off to die.
There’s some commenting on the Kashyyyk Star Map puzzle but I’ll keep it for the chapter in which it’s shown.

You know, I don’t think I took Bastilla with me a whole lot, because frankly I’m not the fan of the character, so I may be missing some scenes but I kinda wish that the psychology of her situation was explored a bit more.

Initially Yoda’s speech thing was due to him being a hermit on a moon for decades. Then the prequels had Yoda in them with the same sentence structure but as less of a dick. They also had him doing stuff.

Yoda’s wisdom, insight and advice is of absolutely no use in any of the films. When he has good advice every one ignores him, and the rest of the time he’s just wrong. He’s pretty good at training Luke, and he saves Anakin and Obi Wan from Dooku*. Everything else is terrible.

When he feels the first Jedi being killed by Order 66 he doesn’t bother to try and call up the others or warn the temple. Yoda sucks.

His “wisdom” about the Force in ‘Empire was what made the Force cool. It was where we learned about this mystic energy field, how life was responsible for it, etc. It was also where what being a Jedi was more or less defined as being a kind of Zen master combined with being a reluctant warrior. He prepped Luke for his confrontation with the Emperor.

By contrast, the Yoda (and everything about the Jedi) in the prequels further pushed being a Jedi into the role of a gung-ho fightin’ wizard who was either hyper-violent or utterly inactive and useless.

While I know it’s not in the spirit of Star Wars, I don’t know that we should actually ding it for two members of a species having different accents and grammar. (Especially when separated by millennia.)

In my early runs through the game, I always took Carth with me to the ruins (and to do the Sandral-Matale quest). When I started using other characters, I was disappointed to find that they don’t have nearly as much to say as Carth does. (You may now make the requisite jokes at Carth’s expense. Go on. I’ll wait.) I like how Carth and Bastila interact with each other during quest-related conversations in a way that the other companions tend not to do. In fact, Carth will actually sometimes butt in to “Bastila looks like she has something to say” conversations.

One of my favorite exchanges in the game is in the Sandral-Matle quest: “I’m impressed, Carth. That interjection was very Jedi-like.” “Well, what can I say. You pick up a few things.”

5. Other droids that make beeping noises all the time, even though nobody understands them. and certain people (protagonist always included) inexplicably understand them despite there being no way that the non-unique noises and patterns could be capable of conveying the ideas that were evidently conveyed.

Looking lived in! Not uniform grimy brown, but everything in Star Wars looks like it actually gets used. No sterile futuristic cleanliness (which is a pretty direct contrast to Star Trek and quite a lot of other space-faring scifi)

It’s one of the main reasons Quigon and Obi-wan’s ship in the Phantom Menace bothered the crap out of me. Polished silver, gleaming and sleek ain’t Star Wars. They tried to make something “futuristic” and forgot the aesthetic wasn’t about that.

I didn’t like it. The shininess was one aspect of its un-appeal for me, as it just seemed to make the Queen more oddly opulent on a planet with no apparent citizenry beyond Gungans and about a dozen actual people. It also bugged me how it was basically a shiny version of an SR-71 Blackbird.

Have you seen how the leaders of the prequel dressed like. They were all about ridiculous show of extravagance. Even Mon-Mothma the leader of the rebel alliance was rocking a fairly impressive dress. So anyway all this to say that to me it make sense that the queen of even a lowly planet like Naboo would have a magnificent ship.

Even if Naboo was a poverty stricken backwater (doesn’t look like it whenever we see their architecture) Queen would have a nice spaceship. Look at any third world dictator, they have swag. Even modest head of state has nice limousine because resources of even impoverished country are vast. Price of one luxury car won’t fund health care or education for even a day, contrary to common belief.

Could you make an argument that the queen having a nicer-than-average ship makes sense? Sure. But my point is not whether it makes sense that the ship looks “nice.” It’s whether it looks like it belongs.

The emperor travels in a less sci-fi, futuristic-y looking ship than this. No other ship in the universe looks like this. Not close.

To me, it’s like a universe where everyone travels by hot air balloon, and then someone else has a helicopter. It’s not that they can or cannot afford a helicopter – it’s that we’ve established what airships look like in this world, and that’s not one.

Whether it looks “cool” is (to me, anyways, but maybe I’m more bothered by this than some) doesn’t matter as much as whether it fits.

Well the emperor was an almost universally reviled political figure so he probably didn’t want everyone to figure out his shuttle and since he was essentially the uncontested ruler of the empire he didn’t really need to show-off.

#4 – Amusing personalities maybe – but none (outside R2) are really ‘eccentric’. Few are slender either. Typically just the ones that are explicitly designed for melding into wealthy social situations.

#7 – Only the Jedi/Sith dudes wear robes. Most of the capes are fashion accessories and not environmental garments (my take on them anyway and why Vader has one).

As for the ‘old aesthetic’ – that changes from place to place depending on where the scene is set. Imperial ships and facilities are sleek, cleanly sterile, and grey. Rebel facilities are rough and makeshift. Tatooine looks like the impoverished backwater it is. The MF looks like the bailed together POS it (mostly) is. Cloud City looks like a mildy prosperous commercial outfit that is dependent on the maintenance of high tech to continue to exist that it is.

tl;dr

I think your list is things that are *in* Star Wars, but not a list of things that *define* the SW aesthetic. Even within the first movie we see a variety of set designs. Especially today – some of it is things that set the setting apart from its contemporaries, but a lot of that list is pretty bog standard sci-fi trope today.

On Starship names, don’t forget that bad-guy ships have to be named things like Dominator or Executor, things that sound evil and threatening; good-guy ships get to be named like Champion, Alliance and Ardent, or they get to have more personal names like the Millennium Falcon.

For bad-guy star-fighter squadrons you get cold, sterile names like 12th Squadron, or 181st Imperial Fighter Wing, unless they’re elite fighter squadrons, then they get cool names. Good-guy star-fighter squadrons you get cool names right off the bat like Rogue, Wraith, or, looking through the Wookiepedia list of Rebel star-fighter squadrons, gems like the Lightspeed Panthers or the Flying Bantha Squadron.

I actually looked that up because I’m re-reading the Rogue Squadron books.

The reason its Red Squadron is because they shoved together a bunch of other X-Wing and Y-Wing squadrons to get a bunch of fighters to attack the Death Star. When only two guys actually lived (Luke and Wedge), they just got shoved into a new Red Squadron, which was Renegade and Rogue flights. Then Rogue flight got really good, Renegade flight got destroyed at Hoth, and Wedge decided to make it just Rogue Squadron.

To be fair Empire has hundreds of thousands if not millions of fighter squadrons. For Rebel alliance primary colours get the job done. Also you don’t want to explain to new recruits why there are large gaps in squadron numbers . Or why their squadron number will suddenly change from 48th to 12th if you want to remove the gaps.

Records suggest that the first one was captured from the French and called the Pallas, then renamed Convert, which sort of makes sense, then renamed again to Inconstant, which I guess makes sense as it’s changed sides once and name twice?

Or maybe the word meant something subtly different in the 18th century. More Maverick than Unreliable.

Aye – it was the Pallas under the French, so renaming it ‘Fickle’ would essentially be the British Navy going ‘nyah, nyah’. As a Brit I find this highly plausible…

Similar considerations might well apply to later ones – or maybe one of them did something really awesome at sea, and subsequently other HMS Inconstants were called that ‘cos it’d become “cool.” (As a Brit I find…)

Somebody lost a bet? Or alternatively, the word sounded good and no one bothered to look it up till later. You’d be surprised how often that happens (especially before looking things up was so easy. It took my great-grandfather about 3 years to look up fluorine and discover he’d spelled it wrong when he named a daughter and he was a printer)

It would be mid-eighteenth century so it’s quite possible that the first lord of the admiralty had a whole bunch of ships to name and asked his children and/or mistress for suggestions when he ran out of ideas.

I disagree on the droids not being slender. Look at IG-88, the (ugh) Battle Droids, the torture droid in Jabba’s palace, the Imperial Probe droid (though the “slenderness” was more its arms), the WED Treadwell droid, etc.

I think this came about due to the era when Star Wars was made, in that it was probably easier to make droids (that weren’t costumes) with skinny crane-like limbs that were (1) light and (2) easily moved by off-camera puppeteers. The few beefy droids we’ve seen were practically stationary props or were wheeled garbage cans like R2.

It’s an attributive noun in a phrase like ‘Millennium Falcon’. Attributive nouns function as adjectives, so just saying ‘adjective birdname’ is a quick & easy shorthand, with the large advantage that it’s much clearer for those who haven’t encountered the phrase ‘attributive noun’.

Although that said, ‘Millennium Falcon’ is not actually an attributive noun phrase, but rather a compound proper noun. As such, ‘Falcon’ in ‘Millennium Falcon’ isn’t really a noun, and neither is ‘Millennium’. This despite the fact that the ship itself can be (and often is) called just ‘the Falcon’, where ‘Falcon’ is also proper noun.

An important thing Star Wars needs to have is odd, ubiquitous use of the z-axis.

Whether it’s bridge officers literally walking above pits of computer clerks, corridors inexplicably sitting above floor height in the detention level only to lead down stairs into the cells again, whether you have moisture farmers live in holes in the ground or connect everything with walkways over pits…
If a star wars character isn’t walking up or down ramps or stairs half the time, you’re doing it wrong.

This is one of the areas where the excessive green screening of the prequels really hurt the star wars feel. The action scenes were mostly fine, because they did use three dimensional spaces, but the calm scenes rarely did and it felt boring to watch (besides all the plot issues).

Text that is written upside-down, backwards or vertically, even on screens with chairs in front of them, that are only usable while sitting in the chair. Being able to read mirror print while floating in zero gravity is such a part of Basic literacy that nobody thinks it’s weird, even if they themselves never leave their homeworld.

The Basic alphabet has characters that can be easily distinguished even if you are unsure of their orientations. Pairings like U and C, , ‘ and ,, or even \ and / are unacceptable.

Bold visuals with dynamic framing are a must. Find a way to break up any empty floor space, especially in the foreground of a shot. Anything that reminds you of a Three Camera Sitcom must die immediately. Bottomless pits with a bunch of distant details are a great way to add visual texture without actually blocking the audience’s line of sight, but never lose sight of the actual goal. If I see two people sitting at a normal table or on a couch looking at the camera over a coffee table, a member of the design team will be executed at random.

Women’s costumes must be as fantastical as possible. They need to evoke classic pulp movies, adventure serials orsword and sorcery tales as often as possible. If you design a female character and her outfit wouldn’t be at home in Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, Conan the Barbarian, or Amazon Women on the moon, half of it needs to be destroyed, and you should add some kind of flowing scarf.

Haircuts should be practical, but seemingly foreign to American viewers. You can’t have something that will ruin the stunt choreography, but steal old unused styles from western Europe and Southeast Asia whenever you can. This goes double for women. Evil characters can just be bald instead.

Computer screens display 3 color graphics at shockingly bad resolutions. For this reason everyone uses holograms, even though they only do monochrome. This is probably why people prefer robots that just tell them things.

When in doubt, break the hyperdrive. A hyperdrive killed your parents or something.

Explosions chain react all the time. Power converters and fuel cells are always stored just far enough apart that blowing one up causes several others to explode in sequence.

Chris, Mandalor and Mandalorians are still a thing after all the KoTOR, KoTOR II and SWTOR stuff (The Bounty Hunter in their story-line actually becomes an honorary Mandalorian at the start of Act II), its just not as big a deal as it is in this point and time. In the old canon, before Disney wipped everything, it was Mandalorians who trained the Clone Commandos and ARC Troopers and all the other non rank-and-file clones during the Clone Wars, and they still become Bounty Hunters and stuff, but its not a big deal to be a Mandalorian. At least, that’s what I remember.

Disney didn’t wipe the Mandalorian canon. Lucas did. If you’ll notice, there were no Mandalorians training anyone for the Clone Wars. If you say it happened in the cartoon, then the argument ensues about what tier of canon that is.

In the cartoon (which had some Lucas involvement so it’s higher canon than a book with no Lucas input) they don’t explicitly contradict idea of mando mercenaries training clones, but they show non-mandalorian bounty hunter training clones.

The book basically had Jango Fett get hired to train the army, and he hired a bunch of mercenaries and bounty hunters to help him. Roughly half of the subcontractors he hired were Mandalorians. So it all fits together better than I expected it to.

The evil government was more an original films thing. The prequel had more of an inefficient government because it was too busy with status and appearance to actually do anything else while the companies were doing everything they could to get more profits.

Khan is a very common surname throughout Persia and South Asia, and there is a fair amount of genetic evidence to support the hypothesis that most people with that surname actually are decedents of Genghis Khan. If this Cassus Fett was a famous conqueror then maybe he also had legions of decedents.

More generally, past a certain point, you can be almost 100% certain that everybody that had decedents is one of your ancestors… If you go backward in generations you double the number of ancestors each generation. 2**30 ~ 1 billion ancestors, which is many more people than lived on the planet 900 years ago. It gets even more ridiculous if you go back 60 generations (maybe 1800 years, depending on generation length) you have 10**18 ancestors, which is many orders of magnitude more people than have ever lived, and probably ever will.

It must be the case that just about everybody is your ancestor. The interesting question is who is your ancestor more than once?

So, the notion that Cassus Fett was Boba Fetts ancestor is perfectly legit. Mandalore, Canderous, Carth Onasi, Bastilla, and any other semi-human characters you meet are probably also his direct ancestors. Calling some ancient figure that had children your direct ancestor is kind of like calling the sky blue.

This is actually one of the few parts of the 4000 year timeskip that actually works for me.

The Twi’lek culture is supposed to be a patriarchal clan structure, where males derive social status from their ancestors, and the rules of inheritance are insanely complex. (Females gain social status by getting the fuck off of this shithole planet, even if it means becoming a pirate, bounty hunter or “exotic dancer”.)

Twi’lek males are supposed to live a couple hundred years if they can land a nice safe office job, and a wealthy clan lord is likely to have a harem. Put that together and you have a lot of potential heirs looking to maximize their tiny slice of a very large pie.

Considering the potential losses one could suffer by being unable to prove their distant connection to a recently deceased clanlord, and the wide availability of resilient, easily-duplicated data storage devices, only a fool wouldn’t have backups of the copies of his great half-uncle’s family tree.

We lose a lot of heritage data in our culture because preserving it is a lot of work and most people aren’t motivated to get around to it until Grandma Florence is already dead and nobody knows what to do with her grandmother’s old documents that she’s been keeping in a shoebox for 60 years. (I recently inherited a torn bag full of WWII letters home and 60 year old newspaper clippings. Thankfully, I know a trained anthropologist who used to work on old letters for the Jewish Heritage Museum, but how many people in my position don’t have the resources to preserve something like this?)

The Great ReSynchronization (sic) was “a 60 year long notation system that was established in 35 BBY by the Republic Measures & Standards Bureau to recalibrate the disparate dating systems. Later in 25 ABY, it was disbanded and reorganized by the New Republic into the GSC”http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Great_ReSynchronization

The bureaucracy behind creating their dating system is established canon.

Absolutely, but you can say that for lots of people on Earth with descendants right? But saying “In 3,000 years time there will be a brilliant hologram director called Sam Shakespeare, a direct descendent of William Shakespeare” – that still sounds nuts. Or “In 4000AD there’ll be an amazing general directly descended from Genghis Khan, called Bob Khan”.

Maybe part of what makes it silly is just the Star Wars conceit that by the time 4,000 years rolls around, everything will be exactly the same up to and including everyone still having the same names. It’s crazy that a family would keep the same name father to son, father to son, for much much longer than the lifetime of civilisations but it’s just a trope of Star Wars that language drift isn’t a thing

The really weird part is that not all of the writers followed the whole “technological stasis” conceit, and it leads to some really weird seams in the timeline.

For example, it’s actually only 3940 years BBY, not a full 4000, because if we went that far back, we’d be stepping on the toes of the Tales of the Jedi series, where the Jedi order worked in a completely different way and the council hadn’t been established yet.

Bioware chooses to ignore this fact as much as possible, expect for Jolee “The last sane man” Bindo, griping that back in his day we didn’t need no Jedi Council telling us what to do, and we liked it that way.

One of the little touches I liked playing as Sith Inquisitor is that you got to open a lot of conversations by implicitly threatening to electrocute the questgiver if he ever took his opening disrespectful tone with you again. Then he’d say “Yes, my lord!” and politely describe whatever problem he was having. You can do all the quests without any backtalk.

I remember way back reading an article about Jade Empire. It turns out they actually made a constructed language of some degree of sophistication for the old language in it. Not Tolkien levels of sophistication, and mostly Frankensteined together from actual east/southeast Asian languages, but respectably large.

Then, for reasons of voice actor time, they recorded a relatively small number of lines with various emotions. Most of them were about cows.

There’s heroes flying by the seat of their pants, lots of technology and crazy junk in the background without grabbing the viewer and forcing them to sit through an explanation of how it works, the line, “I have a bad feeling about this,” and wipe transitions.

But one of the most star warsy things there is, and the thing I’m absolutely certain that JJ Abrams is going to mess up, is greebling. That’s when you stick a bunch of various technological junk onto an otherwise smooth surface in order to make it more visually busy, It kind of goes hand in hand with the way that Star Wars presents all sorts of technology without explaining it. All the greebling makes it look like it actually is a mechanism rather than just a farce.

And JJ Abrams clearly ain’t never greebled in his life. His version of the X-Wing looks more streamlined, the ball droid is all smooth instead of being covered with bits and pieces and nonfunctional electrical sockets like R2-D2, and the sad panda stormtroopers are all smooth and round like an apple product. I hate it.

Sadly, JJ would be following Lucas’ directions in the prequels with that. Pretty much everything Nabooian is stupidly smooth rather than interesting.

It was somewhat excusable as it was the art direction for one planet, and one not touched yet by years of civil war. But when even the fairytale planet diplomatic ship Tantive IV is all geebled up (yes, I know the EU says it’s made by the same people as the Falcon, but the movies only ever showed it in possession of alderaanians), then the smooth, shiny starfighters of Naboo look really out of place.

Regarding languages, named languages will be gibberish, but based on specific Earth language sounds, like Huttese being based on Quechua and Ewok on Tibetan, giving them a distinct enough flavour. Interestingly, Jawas are supposed to use pheromones to show emotional state, like the elephant dudes in Mass Effect. There’s a fair bit of species-specific language tricks, like Twi’lek apparently including tentacle signs in addition to speech.

Apparently there was an effort to create a Mandalorian language, using a song from Republic Commando as a base, but it didn’t really go all that far. This is somewhat similar to how Klingon started, in the Motion Picture it was just gibberish, then they handed that off to Marc Okrand to make something more consistent. I have the impression that Klingon is a lot simpler than any one Tolkien language, but then he made languages for fun and then created a world for them to inhabit so that’s kind of a given.

Theme planets. Space is big, and we want to tell this epic tale across as much of it as possible, so it should be impossible to get all of the scenery on a single planet. We need desert planets, ice planets, forest planets. There’ll be a civilization planet with a single planet-wide city on it and the galactic government, but it would lower property values to also have agriculture and industry there so we’ll need like, a 7-11 planet nearby where we can go to get food and shit.

Let’s make Coruscant a city-planet with a population of one trillion! I’m sure there will be no environmental consequences, or immediate mass starvation on an unimaginable scale if there’s ever any disruption of trade.

By the way, we’re designating your nearby world as our sewer planet – apologies for any inconvenience.

If you can make moon sized mobile space stations I think you can figure out how to recycle your crap and how to grow stuff in a greenhouse.We already have the technology to hydroponically grow crops in basically a warehouse with lettuce growing on dozens of shelves (with day/night cycle optimized for growth). Imagine what could you achieve with GMO if you could use antigravity so an oversized fruit does not break the branch it’s growing on with it’s weight.

Elsewhere I mentioned Star Wars has problems with time, but it also has problems with space. I find this latter problem less worth fixing on but both of Star Wars’ problems with scale or scope boil down to the fact that they’re stories written by and for people who can’t even have a sense of the scale or diversity of their own planet, let alone the barely-countable number that exist beyond it.

I think that the greatest characteristic from Star Wars that KotOR really nailed was the concept that the galaxy is really, really small. Luke has an entire planet to crash land on and somehow almost lands right on top of Yoda. Every planet is exactly the same all over, even the local culture. There’s only half a dozen planets of any note in the entire galaxy (and, if that galactic map from the Ebon Hawk is to be believed, each of those planets are in a different corner of the galaxy, so crossing the entire galaxy is clearly no effort whatsoever and takes a couple of days at most).

From Luke and Leia being siblings, to Luke jumping a *single-seat with no facilities* fighter to Dagobah and then landing right on top of Yoda.

To the prequels where we find Anakin built C-3PO. To Sonny-Jin being the one who discovers how to become a force ghost and teaches Yoda and Obi-wan. Oh, and Chewbacca knowing (and fighting alongside) Yoda.

Then we get into the whole – major change of technological aesthetic and military philosophy in a decade and a half to a rebellion that changes the face of the galaxy by killing a single man – all of a sudden everybody’s throwing a party and not cowering in fear of the local apparatus of governance that kept them under the imperial heel (and which hasn’t suddenly gone away).

Not only the Galaxy is really small, there is no evolution whatsoever. Periods separated by 20000 years use the same technology and has in fashion the same silly hats. Behold the New Sith empire, the clone copy of the old Sith empire. It really makes the Galaxy feel like some backwater village.

In the EU they explain that Yoda took advantage of the fog to use the Force to guide Luke to roughly where he wanted him to land. Otherwise he might have pancaked into the ground or a tree instead of splashing into the water.

When you’re a Jedi Master and a former student’s ghost stops in to tell you a new recruit is on the way… you get out the Groucho Marx glasses and turn the landing lights off. When 900 years old you reach, entertainment is hard to come by.

The “A long time ago…” text that lingers at the very start of a Star Wars movie/game, holding suspense for a few seconds until the Star Wars logo is shown and then the iconic opening crawl that it makes even the most cynical Star Wars fan squeal.

Also the end of the opening crawl where the text fade into the horizon leaving only the stars and then panning down/to a planet or similar while the music transitions.

Then there are the wipes/fades between scenes.

Star Wars is “epic” in the way the camera work is done.

I think these are all called “Star Wars Crawl”, “Star Wars Pan”, “Star Wars Wipes”.

Also, you’re doing Charlie Murphy a great disservice by comparing him to this knock-off Yoda numbskull.

Charlie Murphy isn’t the world’s greatest actor, but he was a heck of a writer, and had that transcendent episode of Chapelle’s Show. As compared to knock-off Yoda, who has nothing going for him whatsoever.https://vimeo.com/96158629

The most important thing to remember to get Star Wars right is this if you ask me: Star Wars is not Science Fiction. It doesn’t want to be, it just likes to pretend to be. What it actually is depends on what scene you’re watching – sometimes it’s a World War II commando movie, sometimes it’s got a bit of Gangster flick, sometimes it’s a Kurosawa Samurai movie or a spaghetti western. It’s almost Frankenstein-like, really, taking ideas and images from completely unrelated source material and draping Space Adventure over it, and when its done properly it’s seamless stitchwork.

One of the things that really confounds me about the Original Trilogy – they did that so much, -especially- in A New Hope, and it doesn’t make it seem disjointed – quite the opposite, it makes the world feel more real, more full. Then again, I have glasses so rose-tinted about the original trilogy that it’s a wonder I don’t use them as romantic gestures.

“Ships should be really lumpy.” Although it works when you think about it. Why should a space-bound ship worry about aerodynamics? Some fighters and ships are clearly designed to enter atmosphere, (mostly fighters) and they have streamlining.

“Only fascists mop the floor.” One thing you’re likely not going to have a lot of in space is water to waste on things like over-polishing the floor. I saw it more as a demonstration of waste. It’s also an indication of whether your ship lands or not, if you’re tracking in dirt your ship will be dirty. A Star Destroyer likely has a mudroom for planetside troops to debark and clean up.

Even on the ground, you’re going to get scuffing. Ever been in a building with a shiny floor? Bet it was because someone just came by with the buffer. School floors are super shiny in the morning, but by first bell the floor is dull and there’s bits of wrappers and other garbage.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen Star Wars, but I think ‘head-shaped hair’ is a thing. Like, Luke and Leia had the longest hair and it was only down to their ears or so. Lots of bald droids, bald aliens, helmets that shine and mimic baldness. Only bad guys wear hats that show their hair, and they aren’t the cool bad guys. It’s all very efficient, and if it’s styled it’s styled to shape to the person’s head.